Painting Wales...

I'm catching up with myself now. Only two more weeks of gypsy living, then we're into our lovely new wooden shed in the field in Somerset. Ian tried it out yesterday with his cousin James, and boy does the insulation do the trick. Just a little heat from an electric heater and it stayed warm for most of the next day. Now I'm looking forward to it!

Thought I'd update you on our wonderful painting class in Wales - with our wonderful and talented teacher Rob Ijbema (flattery gets you everywhere). I am still excited about it. It is great to be learning how to use colour, create light and use the brush with oils.

First we create a peachy-coloured wash to cover the white board (we do this the night before so it's got time to dry), then start by marking on a grid - lightly so it's easy to cover up.

Then paint in the dark areas of the picture. The composition is guided by the grid - never place your focal point in the middle, but on one of the lower intersections of the grid. In this picture the main focus is the stream which leads your eye gently across the painting. The horizon does well on the top line of the grid - about one third of the way down the board.

Here is the view we were painting. In terms of tone (lights and darks) you really need to convey a far distance, middle distance and foreground. Each gets successively lighter the further away you get due to the effects of the earths atmosphere. If you squint your eyes when looking at a view you can see it. Blue is a receding colour, and red comes forward.

And here is Rob. We are just using three colours and white to start with - alizarin crimson, ultramarine blue and lemon yellow. A bit of cadmium red is added now and again. Rob paints with a lot of washes - paint mixed with white spirit, rather than layering it on thickly. And he paints in one sitting - 'wet on wet'.

This is my finished attempt...... (I have a lot to learn). Any criticisms gratefully accepted.

And last weeks picture of a frosty February morning.... (I like this one a bit better)
And week 1.......

small furry creatures

Today when getting back to the house i was greeted by a small black furry creature flying madly around the kitchen in circles. A bat! After ducking several times and crawling along the floor to open the door without being hit, I have decided they're quite cute - which is a good thing bearing in mind there are a large number living in our attic. We have been leaving the loft hatch open to stop the pipes freezing during the cold weather so i can only think it decided to take a different route out.

Here it is.... if anyone knows what variety it is do let us know. (If you have a bat-phobia look away now)

Roadkill Cafe, Wales

Well - I've made it back to Newbridge plus dog, to be greeted by the smell of dinner cooking. Mmmm, it smells just like..er......not chicken, definitely not pork - but it's white so perhaps goat? or turkey? Well it turns out Ian didn't have time to go shopping but what a stroke of luck he passed a run-down pheasant on the road to Llandovery yesterday. Oh the joy of having a husband who can cook. I knew we should never have gone to Arizona to the Roadkill Cafe - they really do trade in dead meat scraped off the blistering tarmac.

And yes, sometimes he really CAN cook - fabulously. But today was more on a par with the most disgusting dessert ever made - here it is - powdered banana flavoured diet moussy thing with out-of-date dried banana chips that later got sold to Paignton Zoo for the chimps. Yep, definitely not 10 out of 10 for that one, but it didn't put me off taking the risk to my health of marrying him.

Anyway, full marks for creativity, ingenuity, cost cutting, eating local, fairly traded, low carbon food. Shame about the mental image I now have of Ian stopping the car, picking up the dead and allegedly warm animal, slicing off its breasts and lovingly preparing it for my return. I think that means he loves me.

Colder than Greenland??

We arrived back in Newbridge last night to minus 13 and dropping. I have never known such cold in our country - and i am proud to say this week we live in the coldest place in britain...except it took HOURS for our coats to come off and the house to feel warm again. Our wonderful landlord had saved us from frozen water pipes while we were away, and our lovely neighbours had cleared the snow off our drive - what a welcome. I am SO glad our boiler was fixed last thursday before this hit. I think i would have had to stay in bed with a hot water bottle if we didn't have heating.

Here are some pics from my walk to Llysdinam with Barney this morning....

The river Wye was partly frozen over...

the snow formed crystals on everything....

this is Llysdinam house - often visited by the victorian curate Francis Kilvert for those who have read Kilverts Diaries

and the beautiful snowy welsh hills.

Please note I didn't take a picture of Ians reputedly-frozen nasal hairs.

I was sorely tempted to go with Ian up to Bangor today where he was hosting a business visit to the algae plant. But even from here it's still a 3 hour drive each way and even the prospect of seeing snowdonia in the snow couldn't outweigh the tiredness i feel at the moment from all the driving between somerset and wales. This weekend we made some good decisions on the house - and even bought some flooring for the lounge. Dad should be on commission. I love it - it's engineered oak boarding - with a very dark stain and distressed effect. Can't wait to see it down but sadly it'll probably be at least 6 months away as the walls have to be built first and the roof redone.

Some progress has been made however - Roger has been working faithfully on Ians shed. This is how it looks now..... unfortunately i've got to put in more plans for the minor changes from the planning permission. Shouldn't be a problem though. What do you think of our red cedar boarding? purchased here in wales.

FOOD!

Todays blog is a case of getting something off my chest. So it's less pictures and more writing - if you get to the bottom you can claim your prize of a jar of best apple chutney!

We are thinking a lot about food at the moment - not just the "mmm i could scoff a whole chocolate cake" type of thing - but more "is there an alternative to eating the highly processed, mass produced, crazily transported food we have been consuming for years?". This has not been something that interested me particularly - and to be honest I have glazed over whenever Ian has been enthusiastically proclaiming the end of oil and cheap food. I quite like not having to write a shopping list and just dreamily wander around Sainsburys picking the same things off the well-stocked shelves week after week, to make the same meals give or take a few variations. I haven't been the sort of cook to study recipe books, check ingredients or even watch Jamie Oliver on telly - I have found it all BORING. I have been LAZY.

Is this slowly coming to an end? With Ian doing his Nuffield report on the big question of how food will be produced for a growing population in the face of climate change and decreasing oil reserves, I am brought face to face with this thorny issue on a daily basis. I even woke up in the middle of the night worrying about how I would save seed from runner beans if i ever needed to .... ok I know that's a bit tragic but your mind does strange things in the middle of the night.... I need to get out more.

Anyway I have learnt a few things from all this and I thought I would list them out to get it out of my head (so i can sleep again):-

1. Oil has only been around for at most 150 years and the price of food commodities now directly follows the price of oil in the world markets.

2. Oil is integral to the production of food - 46% of food is grown with nitrogen fertiliser which is oil-based - not to mention plastic packaging, heating, cooling, and transporting it around the world. It is estimated that 2 pints of crude oil is used in total to produce one roast beef dinner (yuk).

3. Way too much land is used to grow crops for biofuels

4. Way too much land is used to grow beef - it takes 15,000 litres of water and 8kg of wheat to produce ONE KILO of beef!

5. In the ratio of energy in to energy out, organic mixed cropping methods are 25 times more efficient than current farming methods.

6. Water is an issue in the developing world like India - we import lettuces from India which are watered from deep ground water wells. New deeper wells are being dug every year as ground water is running out. We are literally importing their water into Britain (in lettuces), taking it out of an eco-system that desperately needs to keep it.

7. It is estimated that for our country to be self-sufficient we need to either grow two-thirds more than we do at the moment - or eat 40% less. I think we'd all be a lot healthier if we did.

The only conclusion i can come to is that we need to eat local, organic and vegetarian - as much as is realistically possible. Sounds a bit boring doesn't it? I like growing things though - and I like eating cake - and I like cooking delicious meals for my guests (as long as i don't have to read a recipe book!). It's a big change and we're not emotionally ready to do it - let alone agriculturally ready. Life is too busy for most people to grow their own food - and gardens are too small. I guess that's why allotments are in hot demand.

I have also come across different goals - like trying to eat at least one food every day that we have grown, gathered or hunted (!). Today we ate tomatoes and aubergines from Ashfield (that counts). But we also ate farmed salmon from Scotland, rice from who-knows-where, broccoli, pepper and onions from? I find you have to think about each individual food item - where it came from, how it was grown, how far it was transported, is it organic, is it made from GMO's and on and on. And that's before even thinking about Fair Trade issues and supermarket domination. It's a VERY BIG SUBJECT.

On that last subject, we are having a gap year from the big supermarkets. It's been a challenge to buy all the bits and pieces I would normally buy in Sainsbury's - lightbulbs, matches, shoe polish, etc etc - and Llandrindod Wells isn't exactly the centre of the universe for shops!! It's been good using the Coop though - we've allowed ourselves that luxury because we've got to eat something apart from apple chutney and tomato soup and they have the best Fair Trade record. It also makes me feel like I'm kind-of on holiday here in Wales, so that's definitely got to be good.